Omaha Blues

by Joseph Lelyveld

Again the family was somewhat dysfunctional. For instance, when Joe was five or six years old, simply because his presence was inconvenient to his parents, he was left for the summer with the maid’s family on a farm of either Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists. The thing that really interested me is that he actually went and checked his memory. It’s a markedly different approach from the way most people would write memoir. He wanted to say not just, “This is what I remember,” but, “This is actually true.”